BANGKOK, 21 August 2019: Student travel company Ground Asia, a spin-off enterprise of Khiri Travel, has introduced responsible traveller training modules and made them free for anyone interested in travelling responsibly.
Students, teachers and faculty can learn how to do the right thing on sensitive issues such as single-use plastics, responsible photography, child safety, and giving donations when visiting Asia and beyond.
The initiative follows Ground Asia’s responsible training workshop for its staff hosted in Mai Chau, Vietnam last March.
“Following the workshop, best practices from four years of leading student groups in Asia were distilled into new practical guidelines, policies and procedures for all Ground Asia trips,” said the company’s general manager Lauren Groves.
The training manual that Ground Asia now adheres to means that the company’s field operations are closely aligned to the values and aims of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
There’s no limit on who can use the new responsible traveller modules. The company says its competitors can also use them for training their own staff, guides and host communities.
“The aim is to provide thoughtful, practical and responsible guidelines that benefit everyone in travel, education and related fields,” said Groves.
Groves adds that responsible traveller values learned at an early age will give young people and the public at large the skills and perspectives to help them be responsible travellers for the rest of their lives.
Formerly a department of Khiri Travel focusing on student educational trips, Ground Asia is now a separate company entity but shares offices with its parent firm in Bangkok and around Asia.
Ground Asia has made its new responsible tourist training guidelines available publicly in a series of presentations here.
We checked the link to download the training files. There are four sections identified; Plastic Waste, Responsible Photography, Child Safety and Responsible Giving. When you click on the link to one of the four sections, you access Google Drive, where there are three files. If you click on download, it zips and downloads the files.
